


Agatha Heterodyne and the Empathy Engine

by Sturzkampf



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-07 00:35:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4242786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sturzkampf/pseuds/Sturzkampf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Agatha Heterodyne tries out her latest invention on a visit to her cousin Princess Mara in Guildern. What can possibly go wrong?</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Agatha Heterodyne and the Empathy Engine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [herdthinner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/herdthinner/gifts).



> _The story is set in Herdthinner’s ‘Pauper Princess’ AU sometime between ‘The Pauper Princess and the Born Legacy’ and ‘The Pauper Princess and the Way of the Trilobite’_
> 
>  
> 
> [Tales of the Pauper Princess](http://archiveofourown.org/series/97703)
> 
>  
> 
>  

“Tell me again why we are doing this here,” asked Violetta, not bothering to hide the disapproval in her voice. “There’s a very nice garden back at Castle Heterodyne. Couldn’t we have used that?”

“No,” replied Agatha Heterodyne, as they walked in the summer sunshine through the lovely formal grounds of Castle Mouseheart, “we most certainly could not. It was created by Saturnus Heterodyne to make my Grandmother happy. Not that I think she ever went in it much, or that she was ever very happy there. The whole point of my new invention is that it will put me in total empathy with my environment. I have no idea what might be in Saturnus’ garden, but I am quite sure I do not want to be in empathy with it. We never did find out what did all those horrible things to that tortoise you know, and the Castle denied all responsibility.”

“Ha! I think you may be getting more cautious as you get older.”

“Don't say that like it's a good thing,” replied Agatha, good-humouredly. “I’m not sure what I’m more insulted by; the implication that I’m getting old or the implication that I’m getting cautious.” Violetta sniffed. She didn't have much in common with Castle Heterodyne, but they did agree that both their lives would be much less stressful if Agatha could be kept locked inside her bedroom and never allowed to wander around outside. 

“So why here, as opposed to, say, the meadows around Mechanicsburg?” she asked.

“Because I wanted to do this is in a garden; a beautiful, peaceful, tranquil environment. Like it says in the poem, see?” Agatha indicated a small painted stone figure with a white beard and pointy hat sitting in one of the flower beds. It was holding up an open book on which was inscribed a little verse:

_The kiss of the sun for pardon_  
_The song of the birds for mirth_  
_One is closer to God in a garden_  
_Than anywhere else on Earth_

And underneath:

_A Souvenir from the Magical Kingdom of Guildern_

As they walked past, the garden gnome gave them a friendly wave. Violetta grimaced, but as she was, after all, a guest she resisted the temptation to smash the automaton to powder for the good of all mankind.

“Sturmhalten doesn’t really have much in the way of gardens,” continued Agatha, completely oblivious to her Smoke Knight’s misgivings, “being stuck at the top of a mountain pass. And Castle Wulfenbach may have a few nice hydroponic flowers in odd places but they don’t really count as a garden. Then I remembered Princess Mara and her wonderful gardens in Guildern. You see the entire point of my Empathy Engine is to become as one with nature and so glimpse the oneness of being and the true nature of creation. So here we are, in the perfect place to conduct our experiment! To glimpse, maybe, the mind of God! It is a Glorious Day for Science!”

Princess Mara Mouseheart and her three children, Isabel, Edward and Silas, were waiting for them on the lawn. Perhaps the lawn and garden were not as perfect as a keen gardener might like, but this garden provided a safe playground for a growing family and so was inclined to be a little ragged around the edges. Fortunately, the head gardener was a tolerant man who liked children.

Watching Mara deal with excited questions from all three of her children at once, Agatha felt a sudden wave of sympathy for her cousin. What a shame, she thought, that Mara had had to give up her life, all her potential, all the things she might have accomplished, in order to be a mother at the beck and call of three demanding children, taking up so much of the time she should have been spending on more productive things. Heaven knows what it would be like when they were all teenagers. What a career she might have had, if only she did not have a family. How sad, thought Agatha. How sad.

Standing by Mara, not too close to intrude, but close enough to keep a watch over the Princess and her children, stood Heather, Mara’s bodyguard. She caught Violetta’s eye and the two women exchanged a silent nod of acknowledgement. If Professor Mittelmind had seen it, he could have written an entire paper about that nod. The relationship between the two was complicated. Firstly they were both trained warriors, so there was a certain amount of natural rivalry; not perhaps the testosterone-fuelled competitiveness there might have been had they been men, but rivalry nevertheless. Then there was the fact that Mara and Agatha were strong Sparks and family, Heterodynes to boot, factors that had led to a certain amount of friction in the past and could well mean that one day Violetta and Heather could end up on opposite sides in a major confrontation. On the other hand, both were dedicated to protecting the lives of young ladies who combined the ability to make inventions capable of demolishing mountains with the self-preservation instincts of a hyperactive lemming, so there was a certain amount of mutual sympathy and understanding mixed in with the rivalry.

When they saw Agatha, Mara, and her children all rushed over and embraced the visitors warmly, talking all the while. Agatha was pleased to see her cousin too, although really she would have liked to hear about her latest Spark creations or her plans for Guildern’s defences, rather than how clever Edward was at drawing sheep or that Isobel had worked out the cube root of 37 to six decimal places in her head. Agatha was pleased to see the children in her own way too and had diplomatically brought each of them a small gift. For Edward, there was a miniature animated model of a fun-sized mobile agony and death dispenser, which Mara secretly thought was not entirely consistent with the pacifistic philosophy of the Kingdom of Guildern, but her son was so enraptured by the new toy it was not going to be possible to take it away from him. She thought it might also be a hint about the Spark-enhanced defences she was supposed to be designing for Guildern. Anyway, Agatha assured her it was just a toy and couldn’t possibly do any damage to anyone or anything. After all the trouble a toy Mara had made for Isobel had caused on their visit to Mechanicsburg (quite by accident of course), she felt she could hardly object.

For Isabel, Agatha had bought something rather more special. Not a toy, because they were for children. Isobel had already broken through, so naturally her Auntie had brought her a real tool suitable for a real Spark – an Isobel-sized adjustable right-leaning Heterodyne wrench, complete with the Mouseheart sigil. The little girl was thrilled and started looking around for things to dismantle.

Little Silas was still too young to really appreciate presents, but Agatha had brought him a large china doll, a simple creation by Spark standards that turned its head to always look at the toddler and let him know that he was never alone. In the weeks that followed, Mara was particularly pleased with the comfort that doll gave to her youngest son; he was always so quiet and well behaved when it was there. It was only sometime later that she found out he was in fact completely terrified of it and whenever they put it next to him he sat frozen in petrified silence in case it came to get him.

Once the introductions had been completed, Edward went to play with his toy soldiers in the garden. Like many little boys brought up in a safe and loving environment by thoughtful, protective and liberal-minded parents he displayed a distressing fascination with guns, weapons and explosions. He had selected a large rockery crowned by a flower tub to be the mountain of the Refuge of Storms and was arranging his forces for a costly but heroic direct assault, with his new clank killing machine assigned to spearhead the first wave. A particularly fat and horrible garden gnome had already been selected to play Martellus von Blitzengaard and placed on the top of the flower tub to await his inevitable defeat by the combined armies of Mechanicsburg and Guildern.

Mara carried little Silas over to his nurse Daphne, who took him back into the castle where he would be well out of the way of any unfortunate freak accidents. Meanwhile, a couple of Mara’s minions (sorry, servants) had brought out the boxes containing Agatha’s tech. They carried them carefully; quite excessively so, Mara thought. She was pleased that they were taking such care of her guest’s invention, which Agatha had told her was very delicate and fragile. What she didn’t know was that when the crates were unloaded from the dirigible from Mechanicsburg Moloch von Zinzer had told them that if they dropped a crate it would probably explode with enough force to leave a twenty foot deep crater. Not true of course, but Moloch was an expert at making sure people treated Agatha’s tech with the respect it deserved. In fact, he’d never known a box of Agatha’s tech make a crater more than ten feet deep.

“You’re sure Kelvin is alright with this?” Agatha asked her cousin as the servants made a hasty retreat, “only in your last letter you said he had a few reservations about unforeseeable side effects.”

“Oh no, he’s fine,” Mara reassured her. “I admit he has had a few misgivings about the Heterodynes since he took the guided tour of the Red Cathedral and it didn’t turn out to be the uplifting spiritual experience he was expecting, but we had a long talk and in the end he agreed that Castle Mouseheart would be the perfect place to conduct your experiment after all. He’s extremely reasonable really.”

“She used the Goo Goo Eyes on him,” Heather chimed in helpfully. “Poor fellow never had a chance.”

“Yes, well, sometimes a husband has to be reminded that he has a duty to his wife to be reasonable,” said Mara huffily, concentrating on unpacking and laying out all the components. Agatha took half a dozen of her little clanks from her tool belt to assist in construction. Isobel helped too, which delayed things somewhat as she wanted to use her new wrench on everything. In the end Mara persuaded her, after a certain amount of negotiation involving pouting and emotional blackmail on both sides, to go and pick some flowers for her Auntie as a ’Thank You’ for her present, with the promise that she could examine the new machine when it was working. Once she was safely out of the way the two Sparks assembled the device, discussing the workings and making several modifications and improvements as they went along. Violetta was disappointed that they didn’t start a blazing row over some minor point of design, as this would have provided the perfect excuse to cancel the entire insane plan.

Watching Agatha at work surrounded by her little clanks Mara felt a sudden wave of sympathy for her cousin. What a shame, she thought, that Agatha had no children of her own to love and to give love back to her, who she could guide and see grow into adulthood and who would be there for her in her declining years. How lonely she must be, how unfulfilled, with only the little clanks she made as surrogate children to keep her company. How sad, thought Mara. How sad.

Finally the Empathy Engine was assembled. It stood around three feet tall and sat on a cast iron support with four legs. It was composed of an insane jumble of cogs, ratchets, springs, sprockets and cantilevers, all in frantic motion, like a disturbed ant hill crawling with metal ants. There were other components in there too. Violetta had been around Sparks long enough to know not to look at them too closely or too think too hard about what they might be; strange cylinders that glowed with an unearthly light and didn’t seem to be completely solid; odd little pieces of mechanism that didn’t obey the laws of perspective; screw heads that gave the distinct impression that they were watching you.  A large glass dome fitted over the whirring, pulsating mass of insane brass and unreasonable steel to keep out the dust. A wooden deck chair was brought for Agatha to sit on. Mara fitted the neural interface, a delicate filigree of gold wire and electrodes, over Agatha’s head, connected it to the main engine with a cable and closed the connection.

“First Switch!” she cried, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice, although she did manage to resist the traditional insane giggle.

 Standing a little to one side, Heather and Violetta both looked at the slightly disorientating, slightly disturbingly extra-dimensional engine and exchanged a glance. ‘Here we go again,’ they both thought.

Reclining in her chair Agatha took a few moments to relax, clear her mind and enjoy the anticipation of embarking on Innovative and Exciting Science. She looked over to Mara, nodded and shut her eyes as her cousin closed the switch that activated the Empathy Engine.

“Second Switch!!”

 Agatha felt a moment of disorientation and then… and then… and then her perception was transformed, expanding outwards to encompass her environment. She was in complete empathy with the emotions, desires and needs of the plants and animals living in that beautiful garden. All of them.

She became aware of a fly trapped in a web being sucked dry, silently screaming as it was eaten alive by the spider. She shifted her perception in horror to perceive -

Isobel picking flowers. Agatha felt the anguish of the plants as their unborn offspring were ripped from them, knowing they would never get the chance to form seeds and grow into children who would have lives of their own. She felt their despair that there would be no next generation; that they had failed to produce progeny. She wrenched her mind away to perceive-

A blackbird eating a worm. She felt the terrible agony and fear of the worm as it is torn apart alive and the all-consuming hunger of the bird as it desperately tried to eat it before it could escape. She turned her head to perceive-

A gardener casually weeding a flower bed. Agatha felt the death agonies of the tiny weeds, each a young life so full of hope and potential, as they were torn out of the ground, their delicate roots ripped away, their bodies mangled, to shrivel and die of thirst and asphyxiation in the gardener’s bucket. Agatha could feel them gasping as they died, could feel herself gasping and dying. And with each stroke of the hoe, she felt the screaming agony of the worms and the nematodes that swam through the soil as the sharp metal sliced them to pieces. She withdrew her gaze to perceive-

Mara walking across the lawn. Agatha felt the plants scream and break beneath the enormous weight of her feet. She felt the death agony of an ant accidentally crushed beneath her heel as though it were own body that was lying there crushed and mangled. She looked down to perceive-

The endless agony of a snail in the leaf mould. Beside it sat a glow-worm larva, no more than an eighth of its size but composed almost entirely of jaws and stomach. It was feeding as its kind does by latching onto the snail with its jaws and then eating its prey alive. Agatha looked up to perceive-

The anguish of a beetle, its body broken but still alive in the beak of a bird flying to its nest, high in a tree. She felt the beetle's death agony as it was fed to one of the hungry chicks. She felt the appalling, frantic hunger of the chicks, all desperate to be fed. She felt the despairing starvation of the weakest chick at the edge of the nest, the one that never gets the insect brought by the parents; the one that the others will soon push out of the nest to die alone.

Desperately Agatha tried to extend her perception to escape the individual tragedies of the terrible garden and encompass all the wonders of nature. Immediately she felt the appalling fear.  Everywhere the fear. The song birds in the trees, all living in terror of hawks or the cat. Never a moment of peace, never a moment of respite. And the myriad insects that buzzed and crawled in profusion among the plants. Everywhere the same terror. The terror of sudden death balanced against the aching driving hunger to find more food, find more food before they starved to death.

And the hatred, the implacable insane hatred that emanated from the birds in their nests, each determined to defend its territory, each desperate to get what limited food there was available before the others of its kind or anything else got it first. Each bird song became a snarling diatribe of anger and abuse.

And the desperation of the plants, all frantically scrambling over each other, trying to get to the precious light before they were outgrown by their neighbours. And the awful desperation of those that lost the ruthless never-ending race, as they slowly starved and choked to death.

Wherever she looked, Agatha felt only pain and despair and fear. She writhed like an animal in a trap but nowhere could she escape the apocalyptic emotions pouring down upon her. The pressure in her head built and built until she felt as though her brain was being squeezed inside the unyielding prison of her skull. She tried to scream, tried to break free, but like the animals and plants around her there could be no escape, no respite from the cruel imperative of survival. She knew that in moments the awful truth revealed by the Empathy Engine would send her permanently mad, and not in a good way.

Suddenly there was a great silent explosion and release of pressure in her head. She felt a brief moment of nausea as she plummeted upward into the sky. Then an abrupt stillness, a calm. The relentless bombardment from her expanded consciousness had gone. She was alone, a bodiless mind floating in an infinite blue void of absolute peace and tranquillity. She understood that she had died and was adrift in the bright blue vault of heaven. Three faces slowly materialised in the sky. Agatha wondered if they were angels come to judge her. The angels looked rather worried; perhaps a not unreasonable state of mind if you’ve just been told to go and pass judgement on a Heterodyne, she decided. Then she realised that the angels looked a lot like Violetta, Mara and Isabel. The scene came into focus. She was lying on her back on the lawn, on top of the collapsed deck chair and staring up into the sky as the three leant over her. There was a smell of burning hair, a metallic taste in her mouth and a dampness on her face. When she put her hand to her nose it came away red with blood.

“You OK?” asked Violetta, her voice full of concern.

“I’m fine,” said Agatha weakly.

“Really?” retorted Violetta, trying unsuccessfully to hide her anxiety behind sarcasm. “I thought you looked a bit distressed there for a moment. Especially when the blood started coming out of your ears. Then when you had the seizure and your chair collapsed I had a distinct suspicion that something wasn’t quite right.”

“Look Auntie Agatha,” trilled Isabel, “I picked you some flowers to make you better!” She thrust a bunch of daisies into Agatha’s face. Agatha shrieked in anguish at the lost generation, the children who would never be born, the anguished parents whose lives had been devastated by… And then she shook off the final effects of the Empathy Engine, as though finally coming awake and escaping from the false reality of a nightmare. Standing over her was a rather worried little girl holding a bunch of flowers, picked with far too little stem, the way little girls always pick flowers. All the instincts and urges of the animals and plants in the beautiful garden became just that, only blind biological functions, no longer translated into thoughts and emotions as though the creatures were sentient or self-aware. She sat up and took the flowers.

“Thank you Isabel, they’re lovely.”

Violetta had already knelt down and started to clean the blood from Agatha’s face, muttering all the while under her breath about how Sparks without any sense whatsoever really deserved all they got, but there were tears of relief on her cheeks that everyone was too polite to notice. Agatha looked over at the Empathy Engine, which had apparently suffered a catastrophic failure. The glass dome was shattered and the delicate mechanism inside smashed beyond repair. There was an occasional pop and shower of blue sparks as various minor components shorted out.

“Gosh Hon,” exclaimed Mara, “A shame about your invention. The neural aetheric dissonance must have unbalanced the qi feedback matrix – or something. Pretty lucky for you, hey?”

“Mamma,” said Isobel, tugging at her mother’s sleeve, “why are you holding that big mallet behind your back?” Mara hushed her quiet. Edward wandered up to Agatha, who was still sitting on the grass, and examined her face closely.

“Auntie Agatha,” he asked seriously, “is your head about to explode?”

Agatha checked her skull carefully. As far as she could tell, there was no permanent damage, just a pretty hefty headache. She’d had much worse in her time.

“No, I don’t think so,” she reassured her nephew.

“Oh! Never mind!” he told her, hiding his disappointment, and went back to the direct what remained of his army in the final suicidal assault on the inner sanctum of the false Storm King’s stronghold. Meanwhile, Violetta had removed all the apparatus from Agatha’s hair, being careful to scrunch the delicate network up as much as possible to make sure it was damaged beyond repair. If von Zinzer didn’t like it, then that was his problem.

“So, did you get ‘Closer to God in a Garden’?” she asked as she helped Agatha to her feet.

“Rather closer than I wanted to be, thank you very much,” Agatha replied. “Now, what are my chances of Cousin Mara’s staff being able to brew a decent cup of tea?”

**Author's Note:**

> _Inspired by all those nature documentaries where the animals are given names and human emotions._   
>  _Princess Mara, her children, Heather, Prince Kelvin and the Magical Kingdom of Guildern are the creations of Herdthinner, from her epic adventures of the Pauper Princess and are used with permission. She mentioned that she would like to see her characters appear in other Fan Fic, and who am I to refuse a Lady and a superior officer?_   
>  _Agatha Heterodyne, Violetta, Moloch von Zinzer and Castle Heterodyne are the creations of Studio Foglio and are of course used without their permission._   
>  _The misquoted poem on the horrible garden gnome was written by Dorothy Frances Gurney (1858-1932) so it is now out of copyright._


End file.
